


whirling 'round like a merry-go-round

by 8The_Great_Perhaps8



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Horror, Lovecraftian, Psychological Horror, vague..........horror...........
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-13
Updated: 2018-03-13
Packaged: 2019-03-30 16:00:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13955049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8The_Great_Perhaps8/pseuds/8The_Great_Perhaps8
Summary: bodies lyin' deep down undergroundGotham is not built of brick and stone- Gotham is built of stories.





	whirling 'round like a merry-go-round

Gotham is not built out of bricks and mortar and wood and stone. Gotham is not built of ancient mysteries, and is not built of forgotten bones, and it is not built of family secrets. Gotham is not built of fears and it is not built of crimes and it is not built of some far-off distant curse.

Gotham is built on swamps, and it is built out of _stories_.

There’s an old story in Gotham, about a Court of Owls- some people laugh at it as though there were owl lawyers and owl judges and owl plaintiffs and owl defendants and an owl jury and an owl court reporter.

Some people laugh at it as though there was an owl prince and an owl queen and owl dukes and barons and duchesses and baronesses and owl behavior lessons and owl ballroom dances.

Some people know why the old Gotham story about the Court of Owls began, and they do not laugh at all.

There’s an even older story in Gotham, a story about cursed water that has driven the city to the depths of hell- and looking at all the weirdos running around nowadays, doesn’t it seem like an awful lot of them are interested in poisoning the water supply?

There was an episode about it on some History Channel show once, way back, talking about maybe aliens and maybe Krypton and how old _is_ Superman, anyways?

Most folks are fairly sure that the water isn’t cursed or nothing. Just got too much, what’s-the-word, too much fluorine and copper and other dirty things found at the bottom of swamps and mucks and ponds.

There’s a very old story about a group of people who ran away from their homes to Gotham, all the way from South America, and now some of them live in the sewers and some of them take a strange drug that makes them grow incredibly strong.

Most Gothamites consider that a myth, a story about the immigrant rush back in the 1890s.

Some _know_ , though, some remember the superstrong madman screaming as he pounded Batman, some remember the story there was about the Brazilian population in Gotham and their traditions-

But Gothamites are a staunch bunch, and they like their reputation for keeping their heads down, their morale up, and not shaking even if the earth was quaking.

Most people in Gotham ignore the stories. They generally take pride in their reputation for sturdiness and level-headedness.

Some people know the stories, though.

All of the bats of Gotham know about the Court of Owls, know what they did, know who they have.

The laughing man and the riddle-talker and the mad hatter all know about the water’s curse.

And the Bane of Gotham knows about the people who came and settled in Gotham.

But there is one story in Gotham that is not ignored, because in order for a story to be ignored, it must be known.

There are few that remember whispers- the one who best knows the story of the settlers of Gotham has heard whispers of it, and those who knows the story of the cursed water have heard murmurs, and buried deep within the archives of the Court of Owls is a snippet of a memory of the story.

The story goes something like this:

Once upon a time, there lived a little prince. The prince lived a happy life, and he had a happy family, and he lived in a big, beautiful, happy house.

Then, one day, an assassin came and killed the little prince’s parents.

The little prince cried and cried and cried, all the way until the constable of the town came and took him home.

Except for, the little prince had cried so hard that the salt in his tears had eroded his eyes, and the prince had been turned blind.

And so, because the little prince had no eyes to see with, he stumbled out of his happy house, where the constable had taken him, and he kept stumbling until he fell into a deep, dark cave.

And that’s where the little prince had to grow up, because he didn’t know how to climb out of the caves. And so, the little prince was raised by the bats, and he spoke like a bat and he walked like a bat and he found where he was in the caves like a bat.

It’s an old, old story, and there are a hundred different whispered variations. It is deep in the back of everyone’s mind- a memory from before there were memories, a story from before the universe was flipped around, a story from before the universe was reset, a story from before all the universes were all destroyed and became new. It is a memory held in the deepest darkest parts of the brain, in the parts that have existed since before there was humanity, back when humans were little more than apes.

It is a story older than princes and caves and assassins and bats and constables and houses.

I’m sorry, I lied to you earlier.

The story is not in the back of _everyone’s_ mind. It is not in the mind of the people from Metropolis, or from Central City, or Coast City, or Fawcett City.

The story is particular to the people of Gotham and the outlying Gotham suburbs.

Maybe it’s something in the water.

The point is, when little Brucie Wayne watches his parents get shot dead in an alley outside of Zorro, he hears the echo of the story of the little prince in his head.

When Jim Gordon arrives on the scene, his first year of being a policeman, barely any experience in purse-snatchings or perverts with cameras, much less Gotham’s richest residents getting shot in the streets, there’s an ancient voice in the back of his head calling him _constable_.

And then, when Alfred comes to take little Brucie home, and little Bruce is still sobbing in the passenger seat, they both hear an echo of _the tears eroded the little prince’s eyes until he couldn’t see a single thing._

When they finally return home, little Brucie doesn’t go to his room, like most sad little boys would. Little Brucie runs out of the garage, out onto the grounds, and into the forest.

Little Brucie doesn’t find a cave, of course. That would be ridiculous.

Little Brucie just runs into the forest and hides from his fears, and he sobs in his room and he cries at dinner and he cries at breakfast, and little Brucie doesn’t stop crying for months.

Then, five years later, after he has stopped crying and after he has started his training and after he has begun to think of himself as a man, little Brucie discovers the caves beneath the grounds, and the first thing he notices- instinctual, again, some kind of base knowledge- is the bats, the swarms of bats that always seem to be flying all around and squeaking and screaming and hunting.

And then, ten years after that, little Brucie becomes Batman, and he starts hunting down all those nasty criminals in Gotham.

Little Brucie more than halfway grew up in those caves he found when he was just a teenager, in the dark pits with the bottom that seems to go down forever- Brucie had tried, once to climb to the bottom of the pit, but even after the rope had gone taut and Brucie had resorted to free climbing for a good two hours, until there was no light except for his helmet- and even that was flickering, at this point- and the bats were just far off gusts of wind, little Brucie still couldn’t so much as see the bottom.

Little Brucie did hear a long, deep, angry, and _old_ rumbling, though, coming from beneath him.

Lots of people in Gotham don’t know how Batman climbs so fast. The truth is, he doesn’t climb _that_ fast, not in his own mind. To Batman, climbing fast is how fast he climbed that day, when he heard the rumbling beneath him. It had taken little Brucie two hours to get down as far as he could, after an hour on the rope, but it only took him an hour to climb all the very way back to where he had begun his descent from.

So little Brucie didn’t look down while he was in his cave. But he did spend most of his time there, when he wasn’t pretending to be a perfectly well-adjusted young man.

So Brucie got a little pale. So, even though he was barely two inches above average, he always hunched over unless he reminded himself. So he blended into the shadows better than any rich playboy ought to. So he grew more comfortable in the cold, until he hated taking hot showers.

So maybe that rumbling didn’t leave little Brucie be.

Brucie debuts as Batman, and Batman is tall and hunched and pale and something kind of other, something that puts a little bit of fear into people, whether or not they’re the ones committing a crime.

Mostly.

Those madmen who believe in the cursed water don’t seem to mind as much- maybe the copper and fluorine and whatever else is at the bottom of a swamp does something to people’s brains.

That super-strong madman who is very proud of his heritage, thank you very much, doesn’t seem to be scared of anything. And why should he be?

The Court- well, the Court and the Bat barely even know of each other at all, yet, do they.

The first boy that the Bat takes in is small and slight and lithe and angry at the world that killed his parents and wouldn’t let him get revenge.

Bruce takes in the boy, at first, not the Bat- but the boy gets clever soon enough, and when the Bat pretends to be Bruce there’s always a note of falsehood in the air.

The boy pretends not to notice Bruce’s secret, at least, for a little bit, but what little boy who just watched his parents get murdered could leave a secret alone?

The boy discovers the Bat’s caves alone, by way of a secret passage, and he sees the Bat, still half pretending to be Bruce, sitting at a computer with a good number of monitors more than one.

The boy calls out to the Bat, and the Bat permits him to work with him on the case.

They find justice, swiftly, and the boy decides to stay.

The boy hates the caves the way that the Bat never did, and the Bat doesn’t understand why the boy goes storming off after only four hours in the cave- doesn’t he understand the symphony? The beautiful _squeak-drip-whoosh-squeak-squeak-drip-drip_? Doesn’t he feel how the air is the perfect temperature, not like the disgustingly dry heat in the mansion? Doesn’t he long to call for the bats?

But the Bat respects the boy, and he does not ask these questions.

Some time after the boy joins the Bat, the Bat is forced to join another group, with an alien and a clay woman and a mer man and a cyber man and two human men that have only been given gifts, one from an alien and the other from the universe.

The Bat thinks that maybe the alien and the clay woman and the man with the gift of the universe and the cyber man can tell that he is not what he was born as, but not the other two.

The alien sees the Bat, and sees that he is supposed to be human, but the alien has amazing hearing and vision and yet, still, cannot tell where the Bat is nor what he is doing. It terrifies him, but the alien shakes this feeling off and decides to work with the Bat, despite his eerie paleness and aversion to smiling.

The clay woman sees the Bat, and sees the ancient rumbling that has settled in his bones, sees the fear and sadness that he grew out of, sees the caves that he grew up in and sees what he lost. The Bat does not terrify her, but she has a terrible aversion to him- there’s a feeling of disgust, of a this-should-not-exist.

The man with the gift of the universe sees nothing- he can slow time and he slow his own time and he can run faster than the fastest sound wave, but besides what any human would notice about the Bat- and humans can sense ancient fears and dangers, it’s why they don’t go to the forest at night and why they don’t cross rivers at night and why they fear spiders, because these are all ancient fears, and they are what the human is reminded of when he sees the Bat.

The cyber man sees the Bat, and he sees how the Bat’s body temperature is outrageously low, and he sees how the Bat’s heart rate is well under the expected average for an adult human man, and he sees how the Bat seems to have an iron deficiency, and he sees how all these add up to _the Bat shouldn’t be alive_ , but he won’t ask how the Bat got his powers if the Bat won’t ask about the cyber man’s.

The mer man sees the Bat, and sees something disgusting. The mer man has hunted various things and beasts that dwell in the depths of the ocean, ancient krakens and terrible squids and even Moby Dick, and he knows the old and terribly pale horrors of the world from before it was the world, from the ancient days of the Old Gods, and he sees something in the Bat that reminds him of these deep sea haunts and hunts.

The man with the alien gift sees the Bat, and, with how his gift has hypersaturated the world, how it has given everyone some kind of glow, some kind of aura, he sees that the Bat has- there is green, of course, of willpower, and a yellow of fear, buried down beneath the green- an old fear, a beginning fear- and streaks of bright red, because of course he’s angry, who wouldn’t be, but there is another color. Not black, not a color that would come later, but it is a sort of dark gray-yellow, a deep old fear that has been mixed in with something else, something different, and it’s something that none of the man’s friends and superiors at the Lantern Corps can (or _will_ , his brain whispers) tell him about. It is something old and ancient.

But they do not come together to judge each other. They come together to save people, and who among them does not have some secrets?

They accept the Bat as much as they can, which is more than most do.

During nearly the same time as the group, the Bat is joined by a girl, by the constable’s daughter, who wants to help the city the way her father the constable does and she thinks that the Bat knows best.

The girl comes in by force, by storm, and refuses to leave until finally, finally, the Bat decides to let her in on the secret, all of them.

The girl detests the caves, claiming that they give her a headache and that she feels dizzy and nauseous when she’s there.

Then, the girl is shot in the spine by the laughing man, and she retires to her tower, like the princess in the stories.

After the Bat has joined with the people, several years after, the first boy leaves to become himself.

Perhaps five months after this, the Bat finds a new boy.

This new boy is like the first - from the circus- but now he has ginger hair, and-

The universe resets.

The boy leaves the Bat, and the Bat continues on for several months, until he meets a new boy.

This boy makes him laugh at first, purely at the audacity of him. Stealing tires off of Batman’s car! And he came back to take the last one, pretending that the tire iron wasn’t his! 

The Bat ends up needing to chase the boy down to get his tires back, after the new boy smacks him over the head with the tire iron.

The Bat follows the boy, and he thinks he saves the boy, but it turns out that he doesn’t, so he takes the boy in, like he had done so many years ago.

This boy doesn’t merely dislike the caves, as the first boy had- he _hates_ the caves, and this hurts the Bat, who has long considered the caves more of a home than his happy old house. The boy is desperate for the out of doors, for the free fields, for the open land that he has never had as he grew up in an enormous maze of cinderblocks.

The Bat, as incorrect as he has become, has never wanted to hurt anyone. So he takes the boy on field trips to open plains, to tall mountains, to rivers and forests and lakes and beaches, although the sun burns the Bat’s eyes.

The boy stays with the Bat for several years- no, a handful- no, only a few- and then, he goes off searching for his mother, and he is beaten to death with a crowbar.

The Bat, flinching and blistering from the bright, heavy sun, had been too late to save his second son.

The Bat- no, not after this, after his son’s death it is little Brucie again, afraid of the mean old world that’s trying to take away everything that he loves- distances himself from the friends he had formed within his team. He distances himself from the constable, the constable’s daughter, and from the first boy he had taken in.

Little Brucie is so scared of losing what he loves, that he tries his best at not loving anything for a little bit.

It doesn’t last, because nothing ever does.

There’s another boy, and this one comes to Brucie, saying that he knows that Brucie is the Bat, and that he doesn’t want to go to the police, no, he just wants to _help_.

Brucie is doubtful, to say the least.

But, the boy loves the caves, loves the darkness and the solitude, and the Bat is warmed by his presence.

He makes the boy wait six months before he even considers bringing him with the Bat, and then another three before he actually allows the boy to join the Bat.

After this new boy, who is quick and clever and not at all like the dead boy, another girl insists on forcing herself in, and the Bat has to deal with her strolling about in bright purple as though she wanted madmen who believe in cursed water to attack her.

The girl hates the caves, but she hates them in the way that a teenage girl hates anything.

The boy grows up, and his parents die.

The Bat holds the boy as he sobs, and that is the difference between this boy and the Bat- the boy had the Bat, had someone who knew the pain, and the Bat had no one but an old butler still being paid by the Bat’s happy dead parents.

The boy becomes something else, and- he doesn’t _leave_ the Bat, because no one except the boy and the parents leave the Bat forever- but the boy moves out. The girl, too, who had come along by force, begins distancing herself from the Bat while still retaining their connection.

Then, there is another girl- this girl does not speak, but she can fight better than any that the Bat has ever seen, and she does not shy away from his strange mannerisms, his darkness, his caves.

Then, when the girl learns to speak, and the Bat has to retrain her, she begins to hate the caves, to loathe them, and though she still does not shy away from the Bat, she shies from the caves.

Then-

The universe quakes, and he forgets what he was going to say.

Then, the dead boy comes back.

He steals away the new boy, and then gives him back, and there is chaos, because at first, the Bat does not realize who the dead man was. the Bat assumes that he is another madman, another man who believes that the water is cursed, but no, the dead man is far too sane, with his black-and-red-and-green aura.

When the boy finally comes back to the Bat, he finally enjoys the caves, and he accepts the Bat’s strange paleness, his slowness, and the deep rumbling in the Bat’s veins.

After the boy returns, another girl comes, and the Bat has to wonder why girls always insist that they have to join the Bat.

This girl is silent, but the best fighter that the Bat has ever seen. Then, when he teaches her to speak, he must teach her to fight, again, as she can’t understand her old skills.

Then, after the silent girl, a boy comes, who claims to be the son of the Bat.

The Bat accepts this, and accepts the boy as his son, as he has done so many times before.

He trains the boy- not much, because the boy was raised as an assassin, and also the first boy takes more than a bit of responsibility for the boy.

The boy doesn’t seem to mind the caves, the way all of his brothers and sisters have, possibly because his father has the caves in his blood. The boy accepts the cave with all the willingness of a ten-year-old boy accepting anything.

Then, the universes cross, and-

And then, the boy dies.

The Bat- no, not the Bat, after his son dies, right now he is little Brucie once again, scared of the world that takes everything away and angry at the world that has robbed him of so many people- takes the boy and runs to the boy’s grandfather, with his life-giving pools, and then little Brucie keeps running, searching for a way for his son to come back, now that he’s seen that other sons have come back.

Little Brucie does bring his son back, eventually, and the Bat returns.

The Bat continues, and as he does, protecting his city and his planet, the rumbling from the caves grows- not louder, but _deeper_ , farther down, all the way down deep in the bones of the bats and the Bats that frequent the caves.

As the years go by and there is a robin rebellion, and the Bats continue to do their work, the rumbling deep in the caves continue until the Bats’ feel their hearts quake along with their bones.

Finally, years later, when the Bat is considering retirement, a madman, one who believes that the water is cursed, makes his way into the caves.

The man laughs, and his laughter fills the caves and echoes, combining with the rumbling, creating a terrible, deep, loud laughter in the cave.

And then, the madman falls backwards, the same way that he had all those years ago, before he was mad.

The madman falls and falls and falls and falls and then, finally- not finally, because the madman had been falling so long that the Bats above had nearly forgotten about him- meets with the rumbling.

The universe quakes

And quakes again

And shivers

And the laughing man returns, and the universe quakes, and the Bat-

Little Brucie watches his parents be shot, and in the background of the cool dark Gotham night, he hears laughter.

Little Brucie lives through his life again, and the universe quakes and shivers, and it happens again and again and again, each time little Brucie watching his parents get shot and then he becomes the Bat and he finds his sons and then, at the end, every time, the madman falls down the caves.

Finally, after hundreds of thousands of millions of quakes, little Brucie realizes that he’s being told a story.

“Whattaya think, Brucie?” The madman asks. “Good story? It didn’t seem cliché at all, did it?”

The madman sweeps around Brucie, who is sitting in his wooden chair and is confused as his memories recalibrate.

“Y’know, folks say that infinite knowledge, infinite power, gets old. I dunno, though! Somehow, Brucie, you just keep on managing to surprise me.”

The madman snaps his fingers, and the dead bodies of the son-who-came-back and the son-of-the-assassin appear. “A lot of people say ‘well, eventually, everyone falls into a pattern.’ But I haven’t seen you fall into a pattern, Brucie! Besides the big stuff, besides your folks dying and your goody two-shoes qualities, you are always different.”

Brucie stares at his sons’ bodies, not knowing what to do- he does not like being trapped.

“What’s _funny_ , though, Brucie, is how stupid you are from here!” The madman continues. “I always used to think you were so smart, that you were some amazing detective, but from here? You’re nothing. Even compared to what used to be in the caves- and I’m more than half-sure that you got your smarts from what used to be in the caves- I’m so much smarter than it. Maybe it’s my personality.”

“But ya wanna know what’s _really_ funny about how stupid you are, Brucie?” The madman asks. “You wanna know what’s _really_ hilarious?”

Brucie doesn’t move, until the madman flicks his pinky and little Brucie nods up and down.

“What’s _really_ funny,” the madman whispers, as he leans into little Brucie’s ear, “is that we have this little talk at the end, every time, and _every_ time, I tell you how stupid you are and how smart I am, and you forget every time.”

The madman steps back, and watches little Brucie’s eyes flare wide as all the memories of all the hundreds of thousands and millions of loops flood into his brain. Brucie whines, squalling, as the memories overwhelm his brain, as the blood pours out of his ears and his eyes.

“You can never take it, though,” the madman says. “See? Your brain just isn’t anything like mine and my buddy’s. Us, we’ve got it down pat.”

The madman snaps his fingers, and the bodies vanish. The madman snaps his other hand, and little Brucie is standing, is nine-years-old, has forgotten. Finally, the madman claps his hands together, and-

Little Brucie watches his parents die, and the constable is called for the little prince.

Little Brucie finds the caves five years later, when he considers himself a man.

There is no rumbling in the caves. There never was.

Next time, little Brucie watches his parents die, and then breaks his neck falling into a cave as soon as he gets home.

Next time, little Brucie watches his father die, and his mother get mean.

Next time, little Brucie watches his mother die, and his father become a recluse.

Next time, little Brucie watches his parents splat against the train car as he returns from summer camp.

Little Brucie goes round and round and round again, and the madman laughs.

Gotham is not made out of people and citizens- Gotham is made out of stories, repeated over and over again, changing minutely, and every citizen of Gotham remembers these stories in their hindbrain.


End file.
